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Re: war...
John wrote:
> Don is making a analogy. He's saying that your frustration and anger at
> geting a flase charge on your bill is like, in a smaller way, the
> frustration and anger of a victim of profiling.
Actually, no, I wasn't making that kind of analogy. I was saying that mistakes
will happen, and if the machinery exists to persecute people, then inevitably
the wrong people will end up on the receiving end of it. When you get a false
charge on your bill, it's an annoyance; by and large, the credit card companies
know it happens, and they know that in the long run, it's in their interest to
erase such charges. But if you get a false charge of terrorism or crime, it
can ruin your entire life. And I think if you are willing to set up a system
where that can happen to *someone*, you have to ask yourself if you are willing
to be that someone. The Japanese-americans were put in internment camps during
WWII in the name of public safety, because *some* of them *might* be spies. I
think that is grave injustice, and I think it's just an extreme form of
profiling. I don't agree with it, and I think the people that support it don't
realize that it could happen to them, if institutionalized, just as easily as a
false credit card charge. Again, see Brazil.
Sorry to have chimed in again. Just wanted to make sure I had been understood.
Kelvin made some excellent, excellent points in his email, and I would like
to deeply apologize if my intellectual zeal overshadowed my senstitivity. I
was wrong to flippently insult Mr. Bush, and I'm sorry. For what it's worth,
I do think he's doing the best job he can, and I respect him for that.
Now I'm really checking out,
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
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